G8 leaders tackle taxes, Syria, North Korea and terrorism

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and U.S. President Barack Obama during a meeting at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland. Source: RIA Novosti / Sergei Guneev

With the G8 summit in full swing in Northern Ireland, the world's leaders try to tackle financial and international challenges including tax evasion, the Middle East stand-off, the Syrian crisis and the North Korea nuclear problem.

G8 leaders began
their two-day summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in the southwest of Northern
Ireland on Monday, June 17. Their negotiations are taking place at a five-star
hotel, complete with a conference hall accommodating 400 and a golf course.

The Lough Erne summit’s host, British Prime Minister David
Cameron, wants the G8 leaders to think back to the forum’s origins. Originally,
leaders of seven countries gathered at the Rambouillet castle in 1975 on the
initiative of the French president, for a “fireplace chat” that resulted in a declaration
consisting of just 15 points.

Almost 40 years later, Britain, the summit’s organizer, is
taking the forum back to its founding principles – no extensive communiqué,
long motorcades or armies of officials accompanying the leaders. The G8 leaders
are calling on one another to assume responsibility for transforming their good
intentions into concrete steps to strengthen peace and develop the global
economy.

Since those steps have a medium-term outlook, in order to
maximize the positive effect, Britain will have to cooperate more actively with
Russia, which will assume the G8 Presidency in 2014. Therefore, it is not
surprising that Cameron’s first meeting at the summit’s margins is with Russian
President Vladimir Putin.

According to Cameron, the summit’s economic agenda is
focusing on the three T’s – tax, trade, and transparency.

“Those are the issues
we are going to be driving for this year,” the British prime minister said.

He
expects the G8 to achieve a breakthrough in global trade talks, including trans-Atlantic
trade, a partnership within the EU and sweeping away bureaucratic customs
formalities at international borders.

Even so, Cameron attaches even bigger importance to
coordination between the G8 members on fighting tax evasion and exchanging
information on corporation owners. He told journalists ahead of the summit that
truly active measures to combat tax evasion were required, an information
exchange system needed to be created and new standards for control over
corporations to be established.

The summit’s political agenda includes countering
international terrorism, ensuring non-proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, and combating illegal trafficking in conventional arms and
regional conflicts. Special importance is attached to the British G8
Presidency’s initiative on preventing sexual violence against women and
children during armed conflicts.

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Sergei Lavrov, this problem must be resolved primarily on the basis of the
resolutions on violence that have already been adopted by the UN Security
Council and General Assembly.

"Equally serious attention must be paid to other
negative implications of armed conflicts,” Lavrov said.

The summit is reviewing in detail the two-year-old conflict
in Syria, which has claimed more than 80,000 lives.

Despite a number of
differences, Moscow and Washington are applying their best efforts to call an
international conference on Syria and establish a dialogue between the Syrian
government and the opposition. Evidence of use of chemical weapons in Syria
features on the agenda for Vladimir Putin’s meeting with U.S. President Barack
Obama at the margins of the summit, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul
said last week on June 13.

Russia, on the other hand, categorically opposes using
North Korea’s actions as a pretext for a military build-up in the region,
pumping it full of weapons, deploying missile defense systems or taking other
actions going beyond the scope of neutralization of the threat actually posed
by Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programs.

In Moscow’s opinion, the solution
should be sought by using political and diplomatic tools and moving toward a
resumption of the six-party talks that include Russia, China, North Korea,
South Korea, the United States, and Japan.

A political dialogue rooted in the principles of a phased
approach and reciprocity could also serve as the basis for settling the
situation surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. Russia believes that the recent
talks between six international intermediaries (the five permanent UN
Security Council members plus Germany) and Iran in Almaty and Istanbul suggest
that such a dialogue is possible.

The West, meanwhile, pins the lack of
progress at the talks on Iran’s delaying tactics against a background of
continued development of its nuclear technology.

The summit is expected to arrive at a mutual understanding
on the issue of a Middle East settlement. The G8 foreign ministers have
acknowledged that the deadlock with respect to Palestine is clearly overdue for
a solution and that practical steps should be undertaken to restart the
negotiation process between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

They are in
favor of an urgent meeting of international intermediaries on the Middle East
conflict. Moscow also insists on engaging Arab countries, as well as Israel and
Palestine, in the proceedings of the Quartet on the Middle East (Russia, the
U.S., the EU and the UN).

Whether all those provisions will make it into the final
communiqué depends, however, on how the discussions go
between the forum participants.